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October 15, 2006
Installing Fedora Core 5 on a Packard Bell iMedia 2559
I recently had cause to install Fedora Core 5 on a Packard Bell iMedia 2559 with two 2.6GHz Pentium D CPUs. Getting it working was a bear, so I thought I'd share my notes on the experience for the use of others.
The first problem that I encountered was that the installer would stop working at the first point where I needed to switch CDs, with the message An error occurred unmounting the CD. Please make sure you're not accessing /mnt/source from the shell on tty2 and then click OK to retry. Hitting Ctrl-Alt-F2 to switch to the terminal, I tried unmounting the disc manually:
sh-3.1# umount /mnt/source umount: /mount/source: Device or resource busy
Switching to the log terminal with Ctrl-Alt-F3, the following message was visible:
14:50:36 ERROR: exception in unmountCD: (16, 'Device or resource busy')
The install process would also freeze completely sometimes (generally a few screens in, most often immediately after choosing what packages to install) with the following error in the log:
14:50:36 WARNING: Try 1/5 for file:///mnt/source/repodata/filelists.xml.gz failed
Doing a bit of searching indicated that the FC5 installer seems to have difficulties reading from the disc if it's in a high-speed drive. So, I swapped out the DVD-ROM drive for an old CD-ROM job. Plus various combinations of other people suggested disabling APM/ACPI, APIC and even DMA. To do that, it's necessary to edit the kernel arguments when the system is starting up. I issued the following:
apm=off ide=nodma pci=noacpi acpi=off noapic
This, combined with the lower-speed drive, allowed me to install FC5 successfully. Although annoyingly it stored the kernel arguments during the install process, which meant that during the first normal bootup it wouldn't start, probably because DMA was disabled. (The boot messages showed that udev couldn't be started.) If this happens, you need to edit /etc/grub.conf and remove them.
If you've got here from searching for the same problem, I hope this helped.
Posted by hex at 12:34 PM |